Saul seniors to graduate with marketable skills
An infant cow is separated from the adults while they are being milked in the dairy barn at W. B. Saul High Schoo.. | Brianna Spause
Rolling hills and resting livestock transport visitors of Walter Biddle Saul Agricultural High School’s farm outside of the city and deep into a rural lifestyle. Settled into 130 acres adjacent to Fairmount Park in Northwest Philadelphia, students manage a fully operational farm, located on Henry Avenue.
Saul is a magnet program in the Philadelphia School District that has had a track record of success since it’s opening in 1943 with a 95.4 percent graduation rate, as compared to Philadelphia’s all-around 66 percent.
A small class, which reached 546 students in the 2014-2015 year learns by getting dirty. Saul’s working farm houses dairy, horses, sheep, poultry, and swine, as well as the school's meat science program. A field crop area is also located on the campus grounds where students are exposed to a community engagement program that solidifies the importance of farming in an urban area.
Jessica McTameny’s senior Environmental Science class puts the elbow grease behind Henry’s Got Crops, Saul’s Community Supported Agriculture program or CSA that was started in 2009.
“We harveest food like peppers, kale, and lettuce,” senior Nassir said. “We can actually take it home to eat it, so that’s a plus. We harvest, we plant, we weed, we mow, we take care of our landscape. We basically try to make the CSA look presentable.”
Over 100 families benefit from the organic produce harvested from Saul’s fields, which is also accessible through Weaver’s Way Co-op where the produce makes up 10 percent of their fresh goods.
“Being in environmental science, and seeing how the little things you do when you first start out blow up and be successful is a good feeling,” a senior said. “My class did this. You can actually put your name on it”
Under the supervision of volunteer, Scott Blunk, the McTameny’s seniors have also played an integral role in Saul’s composting program that their class piloted in 2013. Bruised apples, used coffee grounds and heaps of cow manure are piled up in a corner of the farm past the growing vegetables and left to decompose. It takes three to four weeks before the waste turns into healthy soil, that is then sold through the farm and by Weaver’s Way.
“One of our first major projects here was the compost, and it has actually been a pretty big success,” a senior said. “It was actually a lot of work, we were out there in the cold scooping up crap and putting it in piles only to move it around the next day. It was really hard, but it paid off.”
W. B. Saul High School is home to a very large farm, which includes a greenhouse, various animals and a composting area. - Brianna Spause